Note: I am planning on podcasting this as an audio essay for a "laptop party" called Lap-POP that I've been virtually invited to be part of in New York City. I thought this piece to be a good one to read and make an interesting audio segment out of; so I reworked it a bit (it really needed editing!) and am reprinting it here; the piece is also old, so for those of you who've come into the blog recently and haven't dug back to all my early posts, I wanted to offer this up as one of my favorite little random pieces of Korea commentary. I don't often get a chance to talk about the various major forces in my life in one fell swoop: race, history, Korea, and Star Trek. So indulge me here. Comments are appreciated.
I love me some Star Trek and always have. I have always thought that people who claim not to like it either have only a superficial impression of it or erroneously thinks that anyone who watches the show must automatically 
be the geeks rebuffed by William Shatner in that infamous Saturday Night Live skit: "Get a life."
OK. So there are geeky aspects to the Trek. I admit that it is quite geek compatible. The show takes place in outer space, there are aliens, blinking gadgets, and oodles of pseudo-tech-talk.
But that's the flippin'-through-the-channels view of the show. If you look under the surface, you'll see some of the best writing on television (the various series have won more than their fair share of Emmy awards), extremely well-fleshed out characters, long-running, consistent, and soap operatic plot lines – elements that mesh together to make for a pretty darn good show. You add on top of that some of the best elements of real science fiction (that being defined against "fantasy" stories and which plot devices of the future society, technology, or other themes that allow a critique of the society we live in today, which is what actually makes Star Wars fantasy, but with the chariots replaced by spaceships and swords replaced by lightsabers) and you get some really smart television that asks a lot of questions that are pertinent to us in the present day. Good science fiction is interesting, fun, and most importantly – challenging. Tellingly, it was the only television show Martin Luther King, Jr. would allow his children to watch. He Nichelle Nichols, when he personally asked her to remain on the show when he heard that she had been considering leaving, that this show was the only that showed a vision of a true equality of the races. It seems outdated by our standards, but it was downright revolutionary at the time.
That's why the original 1963-1966 series of Star Trek was banned from most stations in the American South, because they were too feminist, Communist, and suggestive of race-mixing for the time. I mean, there was even a Russkie deck officer who joined the crew during the second season – Chekov –, along 
with a Japanese navigator, a Black female main character, and an ostensible Scotsman on the bridge. The 1960's viewer was reassured that the cocksure, captain was a white man who didn't take shit off no aliens and always bagged the babes, but his first officer was a decidedly Asiatic-looking alien-human half-breed with devil ears. Here was the walking, talking embodiment of mixed-race – umm, scratch that – mixed-species loving, and he was a main character!
It should come as no surprise, for those of you not up on your Trek trivia, that Star Trek was the first show on television to show an interracial kiss, which got most Southern stations up in arms. Of course, science fiction was the only possible cover under which to get it through the censors even in the liberal, pinko North as well: the ostensible reason the kiss happened was because Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura had been under the control of an alien force using them for his own demented amusement. Neither character is kissing each other by choice, so the factor of an expressed desire for illicit interracial sexual contact is eliminated by this neat plot device. At least it is made palatable by the plot itself, because the kiss is understood to be embarrassing for the characters within the plot itself. The characters apologize for not being able to stop themselves, even though they are merely unwilling parties to the humilating whims of an all-powerful being. Genius.
At this point, dear reader, you must be asking the question – so what the hell does this have to do with Korea?
Well, the fact is, for some inexplicable reason, Koreans hate Star Trek. And I mean DO NOT LIKE AT ALL. So what, ask you? But think about it. For a country that is so relatively culturally colonized by America, in which almost every major genre of any art form is reproduced here, and most anything that enjoys some degree of popularity in the US holds a proportionally similar degree of popularity here, Star Trek is noticably, glaringly absent from the pop culture scene. No DVD's of the television series exist here, and the movies get almost no play. I saw a poster for Star Trek: Nemesis a few years ago in a subway staircase, and it got only a single night of play in a tiny theater in Kangnam. The only other people there was a couple on the other side of the room, and the woman was obviously dragged along by her man. It was sad, very sad.
I am using one of my favorite shows as a foil to get right at the heart of what is an oft-overlooked cultural pattern in a progress-obssessed society that is so deeply and uncritically steeped in a balls-to-the-walls hyper-modernity, the cracks through which one might look to see the under-layer of a deeper, pre-modern web of thinking that lurks beneath everything in the layer above.
One more time, you say? What I am saying is that there just might be a reason that this very American cultural product doesn't translate well into the Korean market – because the show, its assumptions, concerns, and core concepts, for some reason, seem unable to mesh with anything within the Korean cultural framework of the familiar – no matter how much or how little Korea can arguably be called a cultural colony of America.
In fact, the reason shows such as Friends or Sex in the City are hits all over the world lies in those shows' universality, as opposed to the specific and peculiar fit of that foreign culture to the American one. The real reason shows such as Star Trek find such little purchase in certain countries (such as Korea) versus others (such as Germany) is because of the fit – or lack thereof – with the mode within which the countries operate, as well as the extent to which those countries match up with the haughty and barely-concealed Americanness of the show. And Star Trek fan or not, one must admit that the show has had quite an impact on American popular culture, and in its several incarnations, probably has the most screen time of ANY show on television. We're talking 30 some-odd combined years on television, 10 movies, an animated series, and countless other forms of cultural collateral fallout in the forms of toys, conventions, the naming of Navy and NASA ships, and the pervasiveness of catch-phrases ("Beam me up, Scotty") in the general culture.
If one were to take the standard cultural imperialism analysis, one would expect that the structural power of the core would simply express replicate itself onto the culture of the periphery. In other words, the cultural colonialism of America would leave an impression on the foreign cultures it influenced with roughly the same proportion of popularity in terms of the specific cultural products and phenomenae from the home culture that manifest themselves in the cultures on the recieving end – but that doesn't happen in the case of Star Trek..
There are obviously many filters – different mores, values, standards and modes of living, religions – that affect the reception of cultural products. I'm just making the simple argument that because of certain specific factors, some cultural products don't make it over to the Land of the Morning Calm. Space aliens. Shows without a white main lead ("I see Black people!" – shudder). The fact that the two most famous public figures of Korean descent in America – the two Chos (Margaret and John) – have never been able to make the rounds of Korean TV, because then they'd have to show why they got famous in the first place (standup routines about gay sex and "warrrrshing" one's vagina, the concept of the "MILF," or getting high on a blunt before riding a cheetah to White Castle – these don't seem like they'd fly on Korean Sunday night primetime). These things are filtered OUT because of the cultural mismatch of their styles to things that would fit well into the Korean scheme of things. I am willing to bet that if either John or Margaret Cho had gotten as famous as they are as singers, authors, or in another genre of acting, they'd have made the rounds to Korea as Korean Long Lost Son or Daughter #1 long ago.
Along with this anecdotal evidence, I can also present to the reader the fact that every single Korean national with whom I have watched the show, of various backgrounds and levels of education, invariably have the same reaction to watching aliens and humans interacting on the screen as if nothing is out of the 
oridinary: "Eewww. They're so gross. How can you watch such a ridiculous thing?" Or alternatively – "It's so unrealistic! How can something like that even talk?" The comments are generally variations on this theme. What fazes the Korean viewers is the fact of the aliens' difference and the fact that they look so animalistic and...alien. Most Koreans can't seem to get past the "alien" part – that they look so "무서워" (scary) or "징그러워" (disgusting) – before we even get to the facts of the plot being in the far-flung future, or the existence of transporter beams, phasers, and the possibility of galavanting throughout space at "warp speed."
Although watching a bug-eyed "Hobbit" and his shriveled little friend climb a lava mountain with a magic Ring of Power that grants the wearer invisibility and an unnaturally long life, as he's chased by hybrid Elven-Orcs controlled by an evil wizard with a white beard – oh, that's believable – and pretty good drama. And Koreans loved them some 반지의 재왕 (Lord of the Rings). Wait – which is more unrealistic again? I'd bet on humankind coming across a slimy alien or a faster-than-light drive before I'd ever bet on us seeing a 20-foot tall killer troll or a Magical Ring of Power.
So - am I being nitpicky, or is there something more under the surface here? When I consider that question, I think about the fact that Star Trek, judged as an American cultural product, is so very...American. It is steeped in the discourses of multiculturalism, collective Western guilt over colonialism, and in the larger progressive discourses of equality and democracy, as expressed in more obvious aspects of its backstory, which nurses a Utopian vision of equality between the races (and species), complete gender equality and the elimination of poverty, along with constant explorations of contemporary social issues (for example, the Bajoran "comfort women" or the unmistakably Israel-Palestine-oriented critique of the Cardassian "settlers" who encroach on Bajoran lands). Star Trek is unabashedly steeped in very "real" things – the stories, no matter the presence of starships and intergalactic federations and alliances, are still set up in ways we can easily recognize and understand in terms of the pressures and politics of actual human life in the present.
Star Trek is simply more "American" in regard to the way one might define this as a set of ideals that were the basis for every form of progressive "advance" in America – and around most of the world, actually. For better or for worse, whether one thinks of them having come too late or too early, the ideals of equal qualifications for citizenship, racial and gender equality, rights for gay or disabled people, and every other "movement" one might think of involving a group in a disadvantaged position in relation to the white, male, Protestant majority in power – owes its existence to peculiarly American founding ideals.
To the extent that the Star Trek world's "prime directive" of non-interference with developing civilizations expresses guilt over the West's many excesses (e.g. American westward expansion, the eugenics movement, or the resulting Holocaust), Korea is itself still very much caught up in this paradigm of "progress" and "development" that got the West in so much trouble. In a very 
fundamental way, Star Trek is a post-modern set of discourses, whereas Korea is still caught up in a mix between the pre- and presently modern. I mean, add to the aliens the fact that we have a Black bald captain telling white people what to do, and a woman (!) captain on another Star Trek series – whew! That's enough to be downright confusing to a foreign audience used to watching Hollywood movies in which the one Black dude in the commando unit get killed first, or big stars such as "Big Willie" Smith always have to add that special extra helping of blustery Blackness to all his characters. In the end, Black people in space – in most other Hollywood productions – are still just Black people in space. Everything else about humanity may have changed, but Black people are still, subordinate, jovial, and narratively insignificant. Even Korean audiences know that the black dude's gotta go first.
That's one reason I think Star Trek might not gel in a West that is moving from modern to post-modern, while the viewing tastes of Korean audiences were raised on an experience of moving out of pre-modernity into a confident modernity that promises a new car for everyone, clean and luxurious housing, shiny appliances and gadgets, and more leisure time, all of which boost national pride while also partially explain the nation's eventual triumph over evil Communism. To many Koreans, this is a dream come true; to Americans, that's all just so...50's.
And another thing – Star Trek simply looks much more like America than Friends, Sex in the City, Dawson's Creek, Felicity, etc., ad infinitum. Are Koreans the last people on earth who still think America is the land of white folk? Well, apparently, not, since the networks are still making these silly shows. And don't even get me started on the Step-n-Fetchit antics of "The WB" or UPN. There's not too much difference between just having some laughin-n-shuffling black faces on TV and good ole' blackface. Either way, the power of "The Man" is still much in effect, and Koreans pick up on that and filter out the shows that seem to contradict this white vision of America.
But I digress; here's the important point here, I think: A postmodern Star Trek hesitation about the direction of modernity seems to run up against a Korean modern urge to move forward, ahead Warp Factor 9. In this way, the Star Trek spirit is a conflicted one, one that is reflected in the present American moment, in which the urge to "trek" is balanced by an equally strong "trepidation." In any case, even if a Korean viewer might be able to identify with some of these messages, I think that same Korean viewer might never get past a very pre-modern, pre-contact view of the outside world, a paranoid and suspicious view of Otherness. This simple fear of the alien prevents any real (re)consideration of a modern multiculturalism or post-modern multiplicity.
In this way, in a worldview unmarked by the West's trepidation to trek, in which the notion of inevitable and desirable progress is the lifeblood of that civilization's existence – note the lack of attention or even dismissal of ethical concern over the then-questionable triumph of having successfully cloned a human being. I originally write this piece well before the Hwang Woo Seok scandal, and all my concerns about the possible ethical problems posed by human cloning were dismissed as "attacks" against Korea and American "jealousy." But, a thought experiment: if it had been a Western nation – say, for example France, the United States, or Germany – that had led the charge to duplicate human beings from scratch in a petri dish, surely there would have been more trepidation, if only because of the history of the grotesque acts committed in the name of "science" and "progress" in the histories of those very two states. In Korea, you heard not a peep of criticism about the claim of having cloned a human being; in fact, even well after it became clear that the research was faked, the original MBC producers who delivered the scoop on national television were still receiving death threats.
This is one of my points – this is why a Star Trek worldview might actually have a lot to offer to a Korean popular culture; Star Trek has asked myriad questions about what it means to be human, a clone, a slave, a sentient robot, and about the ethics of absolute power, the pitfalls of "progress," and the follies ideology and nationalism. For all these reasons, it is also easy to see why these questions might see actually anathema to Korea's view on the world right now. These are scary questions it might not seem useful to ask.
So one might not be surprised by this Korean view of a very American cultural product. Perhaps in an American effort to express fears of progress and its associated excesses, by involving the alien Other, another palpably real fear of the different and the outsider comes to the fore in the mind of a Korean viewer watching the show for the first time.
In any case, it would be ridiculous to say that Star Trek itself needs to be watched directly by all Koreans, or that doing so will magically make people on the peninsula more moral, further enlightened, or somehow better people.
But – to add to the words of a friend who once said that Koreans are, more than most other places in the world, is in serious need of some good-ass weed, I'll say that sitting back and watching some Trek along with that might do a lot more to mellow Korean folks out. Shit – it can't hurt – and surely it's better than importing The Jerry Springer Show or Freddy Vs. Jason.
And after the who human cloning debacle, am I really so wrong to think this?
So, since I'm not holding my breath for the legalization of pot in Korea, Star Trek DVD's with Korean subtitles it will have to be. So when we starting the petition to Paramount Korea?
